


waltz of the flowers

by sylvansalvia



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, post-159 pre-160
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:27:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22307899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sylvansalvia/pseuds/sylvansalvia
Summary: There was no music in the Lonely. It was never silent, but every sound was nothing but empty white noise. The hiss and rush of waves on sand. Endless static. It was calming, in a way, to be surrounded by quiet, flat background noise. It was the sort of noise that made his mind feel blank, like he was watching everything from below meters of still water at the bottom of a lake. The sounds of the Lonely were peaceful, really, and they had the added benefit of suppressing everything else. They were the auditory equivalent of fog at twilight, making sure he couldn’t see the dying light.Then Jon arrived.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 12
Kudos: 140





	1. Chapter 1

There was no music in the Lonely. It was never silent, but every sound was nothing but empty white noise. The hiss and rush of waves on sand. Endless static. It was calming, in a way, to be surrounded by quiet, flat background noise. It was the sort of noise that made his mind feel blank, like he was watching everything from below meters of still water at the bottom of a lake.

Still, sometimes, when the static receded from the edges of his mind, Martin missed music. Occasionally he would hear a drumbeat pulsing from the earbuds of a member of the research staff as they hurried past. He would catch a few measures of whatever Melanie was humming as she strode past his door. 

Later, though, he started keeping that door shut and took care not to pass anyone in the halls. He didn’t even feel the loss. The sounds of the Lonely were peaceful, really, and they had the added benefit of suppressing everything else. They were the auditory equivalent of fog at twilight, making sure he couldn’t see the dying light.

Then Jon arrived. If Martin had to describe the moment in a poem, he would call it a sunrise. Suddenly, he saw Jon, who was small and disheveled and desperate, with familiar streaks of gray in his hair and flecks of blood scattered across the front of his shirt, and it was exactly like seeing a sunrise. It was like watching the moment when the sun bursts over a mountain, light streaming and flaring in incandescent shades of gold, turning leaves to green glass and the edges of petals to delicate filigree.

Jon took his hand and pulled him back out into the world. Martin felt his feet land solidly on rough asphalt. Overhead, the sky was a crisp early-morning blue, tinted dandelion-gold at the edges. The Institute was only a few blocks away.

They set off in that direction. Martin trailed behind Jon, acutely aware that they were still holding hands. Eventually, he loosened his grip. Perhaps they were still holding hands because Jon had forgotten, or because he was too polite to let go first. Maybe he was making Jon uncomfortable, and Jon was simply too kind to say so.

As soon as he started to pull away, Jon held on tighter, and turned to look at him. His eyes were full of warmth and fierce determination, concern and something Martin didn’t dare put a name to just yet. Martin stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk.

They weren’t the only ones out so early. On the other side of the street, a man stumbled home, clearly drunk. Two women laughed and chatted as they began their morning commute. Somewhere, an ambulance siren wailed, and the sound of a pigeon’s wings fluttered down an alley.

Jon did eventually let go when they reached his car. Martin’s palm tingled. He stood there, thinking about the way their fingers had fit together, while Jon hastily dumped a mess of battered tapes, old newspapers, and overdue library books out of the passenger seat. A cheap ballpoint pen clattered out onto the street. Jon ignored it.

Martin sat awkwardly in the passenger seat as the engine rattled to a start. The car was too old to have Bluetooth, but the radio crackled to life with a fizzing sort of static that made them both jump.

The static faded almost immediately and replaced itself with an orchestra. A wave of music swept into the car, flowing over the worn seats and ebbing around the steering wheel.

“Oh,” John said, startled. “Tchaikovsky.”

Sometime in the Lonely, Martin had forgotten how music could contain so many layers, how songs could be so full of motion. So many sounds slid and sifted through the air in a whirl of colorful movement.

“How do you know?”

“It’s famous,” Jon said defensively. “It’s from _The Nutcracker._ It’s called ‘Waltz of the Flowers.’”

“I didn’t know you liked classical music.”

Jon’s hands relaxed a little on the steering wheel. “I don’t, really. It’s just that my grandmother once took me to see _The Nutcracker._ She saved for ages to be able to buy the tickets. We— we weren’t very good to each other, but it’s still a happy memory.”

It was hard to picture Jon as a child. Martin suspected that he had been approximately fifty years old since birth, at least in his demeanor and speech patterns.

“I’m glad,” Martin said.

Jon’s smile widened almost imperceptibly. He hadn’t smiled for weeks, or maybe for months, but now he kept shooting quick, flickering glances at Martin in the passenger seat. His scarred fingers tapped on the steering wheel, and the corners of his mouth tipped up every few seconds.

They were well and truly stuck in traffic by that point. Sunlight glittered on windshields, and the lights on the cars flashed crimson and gold. On the radio, flutes fluttered as the music billowed around them.

The car in the lane next to them had a window open despite the cold. A French bulldog poked its head out, grinning toothily. Martin waved at it. It panted contentedly back. The song crescendoed triumphantly, and if he listened very carefully, he could hear Jon humming along.

“Why are you so happy?” he asked, half-laughing, half-serious. He hadn’t seen Jon in such a good mood for months. He hadn’t seen Jon for months, full stop.

Jon jumped. “Oh. Well. It’s—” He met Martin’s eyes briefly, fiddling with the collar of his shirt and struggling to find words that made his next statement less heartfelt and desperate. Martin saw the exact moment when he gave up and simply said, “You’re here.”

The world froze in its orbit for a moment. Jon was looking at him again, and all the fear had fallen away from his face. The look in his eyes was heartbreakingly fond, and surprisingly contented. It looked like he was watching a truly spectacular sunrise.

The song ended abruptly, and was replaced at once by the sound of a car horn. Jon cursed under his breath, and the car lurched forward.

“Watch the road, Jon,” Martin said lightly.

John huffed and inched the car further down the road. “When we get out of London,” he said, “we are going to talk properly.”

The words they were leaving unspoken hovered in the air. Martin could see that Jon was itching to say something, to tell him exactly how he felt, but he couldn’t quite fit them together. He would get there, eventually.

“Where are we going?"

“Scotland. One of Daisy’s safehouses. Basira texted me the location.” He hesitated. “I mean, if that’s alright with you.”

“It sounds perfect.”

More classical music spilled from the radio. For months, now, the Lonely had been siphoning memories from Martin’s mind until solitude was all that he could recall. The music was tugging at the missing memories, though, and they filtered back into his mind one by one. The sound of one of Chopin’s nocturnes plinking through his window as the one neighbor who was halfway to being his friend practiced on her piano. Tim’s laugh. Sasha’s real voice, caught on tape. Jon’s face the first time Martin had ever brought him tea, caught between derision and startled, wide-eyed wonder.

The traffic was starting to clear up, and the music gently soared. Every time Jon looked over, a smile flashed from his face like sparks from a tinderbox. Martin had lost the tomblike security of the Lonely, but for the first time in months, they were both fully alive.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The walls were thin and the house was old. Whenever he walked, the floorboards would produce a symphony of creaks, so he could always be sure that someone else was there. He could call out, and his voice would not echo in the small square room, and Martin would always reply.
> 
> “I’m still here, Jon,” he would say from the dusty rose-patterned couch.
> 
> “I’m here,” from the kitchen, holding two cups of tea.
> 
> “Still here,” through an open window, watering the plants in Daisy’s garden.
> 
> Each time, Jon would reply “I’m glad,” so quietly and softly that the words barely ghosted out of his mouth.

Daisy’s safehouse was just a cottage, really. It was a single dusty story, full of cheerful pastel wallpaper and flakes of paint on the hardwood. Jon called it quaint, in a tone that was only slightly derisive. Martin called it cozy.

There were many benefits to a small house. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, Martin was never more than a room away. The Lonely played with distance. An inch was a mile and a mile was a thousand miles, and whenever you thought you were close enough to reach out and touch someone, your fingers would meet nothing but mist. Jon understood that much after spending less than an hour there.

Here, however, distances were always concrete. The walls were thin and the house was old. Whenever he walked, the floorboards would produce a symphony of creaks, so he could always be sure that someone else was there. He could call out, and his voice would not echo in the small square room, and Martin would always reply.

“I’m still here, Jon,” he would say from the dusty rose-patterned couch.

“I’m here,” from the kitchen, holding two cups of tea.

“Still here,” through an open window, watering the plants in Daisy’s garden.

Each time, Jon would reply “I’m glad,” so quietly and softly that the words barely ghosted out of his mouth.

Martin would smile, and Jon would feel his heart beat a little faster. Living in Daisy’s house made him feel like a kaleidoscope full of multicolored glass, constantly tumbling between fluttering, excited nervousness and bright flashes of joy and sharp stabs of fear for Daisy herself. He did think, though, if he had only bothered to look at Martin’s smile in the first place, if he had managed to look up whenever a mug of tea appeared on his desk instead of mumbling vague gratitude or saying something caustic and returning to his work, everything would have been different. The world would have been this bright from the very beginning.

Still, the situation was what it was. Jon was careful never to ask direct questions. He measured his words so that he wouldn’t compel anyone, not Martin or the cashier at the little grocery store down the road or the elderly librarian at the town’s little library. He read a lot, and the information seemed to erase a little of the bone-deep exhaustion. Weirdly, he found a copy of  _ The Little Prince _ in French on a bookshelf in Daisy’s bedroom.

“You speak French?” Martin asked, while Jon was sprawled across the couch with the book and his laptop.

“Yes,” Jon said. “Well, no. It’s, ah, complicated.”

Martin gave him a look. “Are you seriously using your Archivist powers to read  _ The Little Prince? _ ”

The pages crinkled slightly under his hands. “No. No, that would be ridiculous.”

“Then do you speak it—” Martin gestured. “You know, naturally?”

“I studied French for a while in high school. Wasn’t very good at it. Then the Beholding happened— you know that statement about the man who worked at Le Papillon—”

“The man with the beetle girlfriend?”

“Yes, Martin, the man with the beetle girlfriend. The point being, the Beholding allowed me to speak the language. But that’s— having a terrifying fear entity translate for you feels rather cheap somehow, so—” He turned the laptop around. The screen glowed pale blue, covered with conjugations of  _ oublier  _ in various tenses.

“You’re studying it for real.”

“Yes. Well, I’m trying. It’s so hard not to just _know_ what the words mean. But. If I concentrate, I can avoid knowing them until I look them up. It feels a little like trying to stop a river with telekinesis, but I’m trying. I’m doing it.”

Jon took a deep breath, finished with his little speech, and tore his eyes away from his hands. Martin was smiling, sitting opposite him in a hideous shell-pink armchair. In the sunrise-colored light spilling from the windows, he was so beautiful that Jon felt his breath catch in his throat.

“You’re doing so well,” Martin said.

“You don’t have to flatter—”

“I mean it. I’m— I’m proud.”

The book on his lap cascaded to the floor in a flutter of thin pages. For months, now, Jon had wanted someone to say that. He wanted to hear that he was doing a good job, the best that he could be doing, that he was trying and that part of him was still human. No, that wasn’t quite right. He had wanted to hear it from Martin.

He had wanted this moment, specifically, for such a long time that a sense of longing had settled heavily across his shoulders like an old coat. He had wanted to look up and meet Martin’s bright brown eyes behind his gold-rimmed glasses and see nothing but pride and affection. Now he did, and it froze him in place. He almost said something, really. He could feel the pressure of everything he could have said in his chest, words on words on words, none of them the right thing to say. Things like  _ I love you  _ and  _ please stay _ and  _ you make me happier than I ever thought I could be. _

“You spilled tea on your jumper,” was what he actually said.

“Oh,” Martin said, startled. “I suppose I did.”

* * *

Martin waited another week before sitting down with him at Daisy’s kitchen table and informing him, gently but firmly, that they were going to talk.

“About what?” Jon said, startled.

“Remember what you said in the car, on the way here?”

Jon looked blank. 

“When we get out of London,” Martin quoted, “we are going to talk properly.”

“I don’t sound like that.”

“Yeah, you kinda do.”

Jon traced a knot in the wood of the table with his finger. The knots formed a barely visible pattern of concentric circles in the table’s butter-colored wood.

“You’re stalling a little, I think,” Martin said softly.

“I have no idea why I thought you were such an imbecile when we first met,” Jon muttered.

“Thank you, but I feel like bringing that up probably won’t help you with what you’re going to say next,” Martin said, with a trace of amusement in his voice.

“Right.” Jon cleared his throat.

Martin slid a cup of warm, translucent chamomile tea across the table. Jon wrapped his hands around the cup, feeling the warmth on his scars. The tea inside turned to gold where the sunlight hit it, and the steam turned incandescent.

He took a deep breath. Once, as a child, his grandmother took him out into a grassy summer meadow for a picnic. He wandered off, of course, all the way into an unfamiliar field. Little star-shaped flowers dotted the grass, and the air was full of butterflies. A cloud of light, fluttering shapes whirled around him. He felt the soft brush of wings against his skin. There were so many butterflies that he felt sure that they would lift him off the ground and into the sky.

This moment, he thought, was a little like that.

“Martin,” he said, “when we first met, I thought you were utterly incompetent.”

“Again, not really helping your case.”

“No, listen. That was probably one of the greatest mistakes I’ve ever made. You’re— you’re amazing. I know you said you loved me, back in the Lonely, but—”

Jon paused, words caught in his throat, and doubt crossed Martin’s face.

“If you’re trying to let me down gently, then—”

“But I love you  _ now _ . Present— uh, present tense. I have been falling in love with you, little by little, with every small kindness and every incredibly brave thing you’ve done and every new thing I learned about you, so slowly and for so long that I didn’t notice until suddenly you weren’t there anymore. I missed you so much.”

“Oh,” Martin said.

Jon felt his pulse race feverishly. “You don’t— you don’t have to respond right away, of— of course, you can take your time, I know it’s complicated because you were in the Lonely and I might be a monster and—”  
“It’s not complicated,” Martin said. “I love you too.”

“You do?”

“Yes.” Martin said, then, more hesitantly, “May I kiss you?”

Jon carefully moved his tea out of the way, then leaned across the table as an answer to the question.


End file.
